Another Challenge for Providing Mayday-Style Customer Support

When writing about Amazon Mayday, things start out very upbeat. After all, offering a 15 second response time is unheard of, and has all kinds of “game changing” possibilities. On the other hand, business is all about striking a balance between time and money, and the faster you provide service, the more costly the undertaking. So, while Kindle customers can rightly get excited about this, Amazon now has a pretty lofty service standard to uphold. The higher you set the bar, the more that can go wrong.

As you start thinking about this, a lot of questions come to mind about the viability of the Mayday button, and that’s what my more recent posts in this series have focused on. I raised one such challenge in my last post, and will raise another one here.

Challenge #2 -setting unrealistic customer expectations

Not only is a 15 second response promise a great way win over your customers, but it could very well accelerate sales of the new Kindle tablet. Think about that for a moment. I don’t know of any other product launch that comes with its own technical support offering. The Mayday button is only for this product – it’s the only way you can access it, and you can’t use it for anything else. For consumers quibbling over whether to buy Apple, Samsung, Kindle, etc., Mayday can be the clincher in swaying them to Amazon’s side.

That can be a very effective strategy to drive retail sales, and on a high level, you could consider doing something similar in your business. As noted earlier in this series, Amazon wants consumers to use their tablet, but they don’t need to make money selling them. Remember, this is all about the long tail in the world of e-commerce, and the financial value of Kindle is pretty secondary in the big scheme of things. As such, Amazon can afford to support this with a costly form of customer service.

Of course, this assumes Mayday is a costly form of service. When viewed from a legacy mindset, it’s prohibitively expensive, and that’s why it’s never been done before. However, with today’s technology, the cost is much lower for a variety of reasons. Even on that basis, Mayday is somewhat costly, but not extremely so. In other words, Amazon can afford to support a premium service if that translates into happy Kindle users. After all, that should in turn translate into happy Amazon e-commerce customers, and over time the cost of Mayday can easily be amortized.

This isn’t the place to break down Amazon’s business model, but there’s a key message that should make you think about what Mayday could do for your business. Earlier in this series I talked about the high perceived value of video. Not everyone is comfortable using it, but from Amazon’s perspective, it’s as easy to provide as a phone call.

Consumers don’t see it that way, and for them, getting connected via video to a support agent within 15 seconds has a very high perceived value. Amazon knows this, and because they have an efficient cost structure, the Mayday button can become a differentiator for them immediately. You’d like to think their competitors will simply match the Mayday offer, but in reality, they really can’t.

This is great marketing – and business strategy – from Amazon, but before you run out to mimic best practices, consider another potential downside. Once you put Mayday out there, customers will come to expect that level of service all the time. Can Amazon offer Mayday indefinitely? Should they? This raises some questions about the business value over time. As Kindle customers get comfortable with Mayday, they’ll start to wonder why they can’t have this for all forms of customer service with Amazon.

If expectations aren’t properly managed, you can get on a slippery slope here, and soon reach a point where the strategy works against you. This can happen in one of two ways. First, if the Mayday button service starts to falter – response time is taking more than 15 seconds, quality of support is inconsistent, the video experience degrades because so many people are calling Mayday, etc. – the value of this service promise begins to drop. Second, if Amazon is forced to extend the Mayday button to other areas of their business, costs could really spiral out of control. That scenario needs a separate analysis, but I’m sure you get the idea.

You could call these unintended consequences, and it would be of Amazon’s own doing. The initial Mayday button concept is exciting and disruptive, and I’m sure Amazon will have great success. However, we’re also going into uncharted waters now, and they may also be creating a monster if customer expectations become too unrealistic for Mayday to support.

Anything is possible, and as I’ve been showing in this series, there are two sides to the coin. I’m going to wrap up this series with a post or two summarizing the implications and opportunities that Mayday presents for your business.

About the Author

Jon Arnold is Principal of J Arnold & Associates, an independent telecom analyst and strategy consultancy based in Toronto, Ontario. The consultancy’s primary focus is providing thoughtleadership and go-to-market counsel regarding IP communications and disruptive technologies. You follow Jon's everyday insights on his blog and on Twitter.

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